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Comment by mranton | Hacker News Reader

>1. Performance. In terms of latency, this is adding an extra round-trip to each page request (to get the metadata). It's also likely going to load different resources from different servers (hostname, IP) preventing connection reuse. I guess they can't even start fetching data until the full page has loaded?

fair point. We use same technique as lazy-load (you have to wait the full page has loaded).

>3. Economics. If running peer servers really was profitable

Uber doesn't drive taxis himself, airBnB doesn't own property. This is how Uber-economy works. We believe it works in the CDN industry as well. We just don't want to be another CDN provider.

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Three things about "how Uber works":

1. It started out burning huge amounts of investor capital, basically transferring all of that money to drivers and in the form of subsidized rides, to riders.

2. It works today by a combination of the above and underpaying drivers, who generally make less than minimum wage when they manage to cover their completely costs at all. Despite this, prices have gone up dramatically, so that taxis are once again competitive on a price basis.

3. Uber was profitable in 2018, and not before nor since[0]. Deeply, profoundly unprofitable. Why would anyone want to be the Uber of anything?

0. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UBER/uber-technolo...

1. Is basically price dumping using unlimited investor money and is blatantly illegal. But since it "this great big disruptive innovation unicorn", no one batted an eye. And still no one bats an eye in 3. :)

It always underpaid drivers. It exploited drivers not calculating car amortization costs and sometimes not even gas correctly. Also, people do not calculate the value of their time spent waiting (unpaid) and the cost to drive to the pick up (also unpaid). I guess Haraszti laughed his ass off when he learned of this bullshit. https://www.amazon.com/worker-workers-state-Piece-rates-Hung... He basically have proven the socialist state was paying factory workers only when their machine was actually working on a piece and then per the minute. And of course wrote a book criticizing the entire system on the side.

Completely skipping over the privacy concern doesn't seem like an amazing look

Yeah this CDN is going to end up in ublock so quickly, especially since blocking it will just make the library fall back to the origin server.

> This is how Uber-economy works.

> We just don't want to be another CDN provider.

Don't do something differently for the sake of being different. Do something differently because it unlocks some new capability.

Uber was special for a few reasons. Primarily, it was a better UX to use an app for a taxi, and apps couldn't exist when taxis were first popularized. Secondarily, Uber not driving taxis themselves was "different" in labor law handling. Uber didn't own cars/employ drivers not because "they didn't want to be another taxi company" but because they wanted to unlock the capability to pay people differently. It's the same story for AirBnB - what's legal for rental units is not the same as what's legal for hotel rooms.

Any company can rent or own thousands of servers across the planet, we know this because CDNs do it today, and because if an individual can do it, so can a company.

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